Away from the circuit

The helicopter left from the roof of his office building in Santana, in the north of São Paulo, and he flew it himself. Beside him sat the photographer Norio Koike, with 500 rolls of film. It was April 1993, and Adriane Galisteu’s first weekend at Angra dos Reis. When they came down on the lawn of the beach house, his black schnauzer, Kinda, ran to meet the helicopter and growled at the three young women who got out of it.

The house was in a condominium at Praia de Portogallo, on the coast south-west of Rio de Janeiro, and it was his retreat. By Galisteu’s account he bought it from his friend the banker Antônio Carlos de Almeida Braga, with a launch that Braga had named Joanna II after one of his daughters. There was a main house facing the sea, a games room with snooker, table football, table tennis and a big screen for laserdiscs, a pool, a deck and a pier, two launches and, by her count, six jet-skis. Between December 1989 and February 1990, while FISA withheld his licence, he shut himself away there for weeks, and told the reporters at the gate that he had nothing to declare. The next March he spent a few days there with Gerhard Berger, fishing, diving and water-skiing. Angra, Galisteu wrote, was adrenaline level zero.

Kinda ruled the house, waiting on the pier, swimming after his guests and riding in the launches, and in 1993 he told O Globo that she was used to the jet-ski. Her sister, Mouse, lived at his house in Portugal, because the two of them fought. His niece Bianca remembers him stopping his jet-ski to pick rubbish out of the water, and joking that when he retired he would be a nature warden. In June 1991, just before the Mexican Grand Prix, he fell off a jet-ski at Angra and a friend’s machine, following, struck him on the head: 10 stitches.

In his wallet he kept a folded copy of the poem Footprints. Once, he told Galisteu, at a difficult time, he had flown alone to a deserted beach near Angra, run to the end of it and back while Kinda watched from the sand, and seen his single line of footprints; he had felt small, and alive, and before he flew home he circled over them.

Tatuí

The Fazenda Dois Lagos, Two Lakes Farm, lies about 15 km from the town of Tatuí and some 135 km west of São Paulo, and it was the family’s farm as much as his. In 1990 he told Playboy that it had two huge lakes, where he played on jet-skis and water-skis and with radio-controlled boats, and a kart track, where he raced his nephew Bruno; he rode motorbikes and bicycles there, and went running. By Tom Rubython’s account he spent about three years rebuilding it, joining the lakes into one more than a kilometre long and stocking it with more than 100,000 fish, with a main house whose 10 bedrooms faced the water, a tennis court and a boathouse. It had its own airstrip.

In December 1991 he formally opened the kart track with a party for children, and explained why: “My main aim was to throw a party to promote karting in Brazil and encourage children into the sport.” Bruno won the first race. At Easter 1994 he spent the weekend at the farm with Galisteu and the family, and on Sunday 3 April he flew his helicopter from there to the Campo de Marte airfield in São Paulo: the last flight in his logbook.

In the air

Radio-controlled models were his oldest hobby, and the one passion outside racing that he admitted to. In 1984 the family garage in São Paulo held his karts and his model planes and cars; when he went house-hunting in England the next year, one test of a garden was whether he could fly his planes in it; and in May 1986, on the square of Esher Cricket Club, he tried out a new eight-channel model helicopter, made one hard landing, and then mastered it.

The real thing followed. In April 1987, before the Brazilian Grand Prix at Jacarepaguá, he flew in an F-5B of the Brazilian Air Force. On 29 March 1989, three days after the next one, he landed at the air base at Anápolis in his own King Air, escorted by two Mirage IIIs, and flew in a two-seat Mirage with the squadron commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Alberto de Paiva Cortes, who took it to Mach 1.4 and let him take the controls. He had a business jet from 1990, a British Aerospace 125-800 flown by a professional pilot, Owen O’Mahony, and Folha put its value at US$8 million. But the helicopters he flew himself. He qualified as a helicopter pilot in October 1993, with his family’s pilot, Nelson Loureiro, as his instructor, and logged 101 hours. He flew carefully, Loureiro said, and took no risks; aeroplanes he did not like, because they went too fast to see anything beautiful from up there.

Homes

In 1985, with his first earnings from Lotus, he bought a large house near Esher, in Surrey. The owners would not take a young man in a tracksuit seriously, so his old Formula 3 team manager, Dick Bennetts, put on a tie and viewed the houses for him. He shared it, rent-free, with Maurício and Stella Gugelmin, and put vinegar in Maurício’s food and pepper in his milk. From April 1987 he lived officially in Monaco; in 1988 he was renting a ninth-floor flat in the Houston Palace, a short walk from Portier, and he kept a flat in Monaco to the end. In Europe, he said in 1990, he rested as much as he could: early to bed, asleep until midday, hardly leaving the flat, jogging in the late afternoon, while Isabel, a Portuguese woman who worked for him, cooked. If he had a free week, he went home to Brazil.

In 1991 he bought a villa at Quinta do Lago, near Faro in the Algarve, for about 100,000 contos (100 million escudos), and made Portugal his European base. There he ran round the estate for 90 minutes or two hours at a time, sometimes with Thierry and Patricia Boutsen, while Galisteu followed on a bicycle; Juraci, his housekeeper, cooked, cleaned and drove. Honda kept a red NSX for his use in Lisbon, the car in the photograph of him in jeans, washing it with a hosepipe. The house at Sintra that is sometimes called his was a guest house on Braga’s estate. He meant to spend the whole of the 1994 European season at Quinta do Lago, and on 30 April Galisteu arrived there with luggage for five months.

In São Paulo he had a flat of his own by then, on the 17th floor of a building in Rua Paraguai, which his brother, Leonardo, used more than he did. His parents and his sister shared a block of flats in Pacaembu. His companies had their offices in the north zone, where he had grown up, in the Centro Empresarial Vari in Santana, with a helipad on the roof.

Routine and music

His training and diet, from the running track at the University of São Paulo to a rare glass of wine after Monaco in 1990, are told in Mind and faith. On aeroplanes he changed into a pale tracksuit and a white T-shirt, put in earplugs, tilted the seat back and slept. At Angra he kept 40 or 50 pairs of trainers and hundreds of belts, all in order; he was, he told Galisteu, a bit of a maniac. He read the Bible, sometimes more than once a day, he said in 1990, and he carried one in his briefcase.

He travelled alone most of the time, with a Walkman and two small speakers, and listened to tapes his brother made for him: Gal Costa, Simone, Elba Ramalho, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, whose name, in 1990, he had to scratch his head to remember. He liked Phil Collins, Tina Turner and Queen, and Genesis on laserdisc at Angra, and came to like Brazilian country music after seeing Chitãozinho & Xororó; his favourite song, Folha said in 1994, was Milton Nascimento’s Canção da América. Piaggio gave a new Vespa to every pole-sitter, and more than 50 of them went home with him.

Business

The family holding, Ayrton Senna Promoções e Empreendimentos, had 25 people on its staff by 1994. His father was its president, and its directors were Ayrton, Leonardo, his cousin Fábio Machado and Cecília Yoshizawa. Ayrton Senna Licensing, founded in the early 1990s, managed his name and his mark, a stylised S drawn, Folha said, like one of the curves of Interlagos; by Rubython’s account he promoted it from 1991 by wearing its T-shirt under his half-lowered overalls. There followed a 42-foot cruising boat in 1992, a Sega video game, a carbon-fibre bicycle made by Carraro, which he launched in Padua on 28 April 1994, on his way to Imola, and a Ducati that would carry his name.

In January 1994 he launched Senninha, a comic-strip boy of eight drawn by Rogério Martins and Ridaut Dias Jr., with a gang of friends; the first story was given away in schools in February, and the fortnightly comic went on sale in March. It was not only about the commercial side, he said at the launch, but the human one: a way of giving children ideas about sport, leisure and respect, and about living with defeat as well as victory. After 18 months of negotiation, some of it in Germany in person, Senna Import, which had bought a Ford dealership in São Paulo in 1993, became the sole importer of Audi cars into Brazil, and on 29 March 1994, two days after he spun out of the Brazilian Grand Prix, he launched it for 2,000 guests in a Varig hangar at Congonhas airport, with Jô Soares on stage and fireworks. He walked on, Galisteu wrote, with the surprising calm of a presenter.

His own sponsors paid him apart from his teams. From the mid-1980s he wore the cap of Banco Nacional, which reckoned it would have cost 10 times his contract to buy the television time the cap won; it gave away about 1.5 million of them, and twice, by the bank’s account, FISA reprimanded him for wearing it on the podium instead of the tyre company’s. TAG Heuer sponsored him from 1988, and Estrela sold its Autorama slot-car sets with his name from his Formula 3 days. Forbes put his income at US$10 million in 1990, fourth among the world’s sportsmen, and at US$22 million in 1992 and US$18.5 million in 1993, third both times. He had always left money to his father, his cousin, Leonardo and Julian Jakobi, but in 1994, Galisteu said, he began to enjoy being a businessman, and Cecília Yoshizawa said on the night he died that he had been arranging the companies so that the businesses could run on their own.

Plans

His contract with Williams ran for 1994 and 1995. After that, he told Galisteu one evening at Angra, he meant to end his career at Ferrari: even if the Ferrari were no faster than a Beetle, he wanted his last start, his last lap and his last chequered flag to be there. He had come close before. Ferrari approached him in 1990, and in 1993 Jean Todt talked to him for hours at Monza. On Wednesday 27 April 1994, on his way to Imola, he called on Luca di Montezemolo at his home in Bologna, and told him, as Montezemolo remembered it 20 years later, that he wanted to finish his career with Ferrari.

His dream was always to go to Ferrari, … He always told me ‘Gerhard, I want to be one day in Ferrari but I just have never seen the moment where they have been good enough that I know I can deliver’.

Emerson Fittipaldi was sure he would have come to IndyCar racing in the end, and said so at Indianapolis a week after Imola; it was only a question of timing. Honda, by Folha’s account, was planning a team of its own for 1997, and counting on him. In 2014 Viviane said she thought he would have stayed in sport, though not in Formula One, whose backstage politics he disliked. In 1990 he told Playboy that he hoped to marry again, and to get it right this time, and to have children, a boy and a girl if he could choose; though that, he said, was God’s will. If a son of his showed a gift for driving on his father’s lap, as he had, he would not encourage it. He would show him other paths, and support him in whatever he loved.

Quiet giving

His giving was private, and most of it came out only after his death. His family’s pilot, Nelson Loureiro, says that he gave money to the Hospital das Clínicas in São Paulo and to two associations for disabled people, the APAE and the AACD, on condition that nobody was told. Julian Jakobi remembered telephone calls late at night, after a documentary about children maimed in the Balkan wars, asking him to send money, anonymously, and learned only years later from Senna’s cousin that he had been doing the same from Brazil. The royalties from the Senninha toys, the maker said, went to the children’s-rights foundation Abrinq. Sid Watkins knew of another project, and remembered a night of storms at the farm, when the lines were down and Senna drove him through the mud to a village telephone, so that he could ring his wife.

Among his various projects for the poor of Brazil, he funded a programme for medical support for people in the upper reaches of the Amazon. We’d agreed to go together and see it in action at the end of the 1994 season…

… Magically the word had gone around and every child in the village had gathered at the door. While I made my call, Ayrton stood in the rain signing autographs by the light of a street lamp until every child had one.

Not long before Imola, as his sister Viviane remembers it, he asked her to design something more organised. The Ayrton Senna Foundation in London began raising money in July 1994; the Instituto Ayrton Senna was founded in São Paulo that November, and opened officially on 21 March 1995, the day he would have been 35. Its story belongs to Legacy. In his introduction to his company’s portfolio, Folha reported, he had written a line of his own.

Como em tudo na vida, vão-se as pessoas, mas as idéias ficam.

As with everything in life, people go, but ideas remain.